Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Stefan Creemers
Author-X-Name-First: Stefan
Author-X-Name-Last: Creemers
Author-Workplace-Name: IESEG School of Management, Lille, France
KU Leuven, ORSTAT, Leuven, Belgium
Author-Email: s.creemers@ieseg.fr stefan.creemers@kuleuven.be
Author-Name: Perez Armas Luis Fernando 
Author-X-Name-First: Luis Fernando	
Author-X-Name-Last: Perez Armas
Author-Workplace-Name: IESEG School of Management, Lille, France 
Author-Email: l.perezarmas@ieseg.fr
Title: Quantum Computing in Operations Research
Abstract: Quantum computing has sparked a tremendous interest from governments, academics,
and the private sector alike. According to a 2021 McKinsey report, governments have
announced to invest almost $30 billion to develop quantum technologies. Companies
such as IBM, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are also investing heavily, and have already
launched commercial quantum-computing services. Research on quantum computing is
also on the rise with hundreds of publications in Nature, Science, and PNAS. Despite
this enormous interest, quantum computing has received little or no attention in the OR
community. This is somewhat surprising given the potential that has been ascribed to
quantum computers to solve Operations Research (OR) problems. To investigate the
potential of quantum computing from an OR perspective, we discuss the most important
quantum algorithms, and use them to effectively solve the knapsack problem for the
very first time. We verify our results using Qiskit (IBM’s software development kit
for quantum computing), and make available templates that allow to solve other OR
problems. In addition, we highlight a number of important limitations and drawbacks of
quantum computing (when compared to classical computing), and conclude that quantum
computing indeed shows promise, albeit not for every application.
Length: 28 pages
Creation-Date: 2022-08
Revision-Date: 
Publication-Status: 
File-URL: https://www.ieseg.fr/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-OPS-01.pdf
File-Format: Application/pdf
File-Function: 
Number: 2022-OPS-01
Classification-JEL: C44
Keywords: Quantum; computing; algorithm; knapsack
Handle: RePEc:ies:wpaper: E202208